Jay Goldman

I’m a big fan of Mac OS, as anyone who knows me well knows. Apple does a great job of almost everything they do and I’m the first one to recommend their machines and software when people ask me what they should buy. I’m even an iPhone toting post-Blackberry road warrior, and I’m sticking to my story that it’s both the most brilliant and frustrating piece of technology I’ve ever owned.

So, with that obligatory disclaimer out the way, this post kicks off a mini-series on redesigning the one Mac OS X application I think needs the most love: Address Book. I use the full Apple suite — Mail.app, iCal, Address Book — with varying levels of satisfaction, enjoyment, and efficiency. The reason I keep coming back is really the integration: my Mac and my phone are wirelessly up-to-date via MobileMe, and my Mac and work’s Google calendar are kept up-to-date via Spanning Sync. My addresses and calendar entries appear in third party apps because they’re stored in Address Book and iCal, and they wouldn’t if I switched to using something like Entourage or Google’s suite (which doesn’t really do contact management anyway). I don’t use them because they’re stellar pieces of software design, or even because they’re all that great at accomplishing their primary tasks. So far, Mail.app is winning the user interface race between the holy trinity. I really liked iCal under Tiger, although I think the decision in Leopard to remove the drawer with event info in favour of a non-standard, unique to iCal, difficult to use overlay was a big mistake (which I’ll document later). Address Book remains fundamentally unchanged since it first appeared way back in the Cheetah/Puma days (a.k.a. Mac OS X 10.0/10.1).

There are some parts that work well but they are overwhelmed and drowning in the things which are either outright broken or just not very well thought through. The remainder of this mini-series will take a look at a bunch of those, including:

• Entering new addresses (get smart!)
• The wide, wide world (playing well with others)
• Extending (AppleScript to the rescue!)
• Searching (and finding)
• Staying up-to-date (a brief history of my startup career)
• Plugins (Plaxo, Google, SMS, etc.)

Along the way, I plan to do some user experience design, a little information architecture, a touch of programming, and a whole lot of pontificating. Hope you’ll join me!

Likely-related posts:

• Mail Goggles: for serious? Sometimes Google is brilliant, and sometimes you kinda want to...